Introduction: Beyond your Coding Career

There is a lot of churn#

Something that goes unspoken in our industry is that there is a lot of churn. This is why you see so few extremely senior engineers who still primarily code for a living. It’s not just that they are rare, but they are also the only ones that are left.

Recognize symptoms of burnout#

Sometimes, churn can be bad, like the many, many cases of burnout in our industry. Please pace yourself. If you intend this career to be a sustainable one, you shouldn’t be running a marathon at a sprint pace. Recognize symptoms of burnout:

Also, look out for these symptoms in your coworkers. As technical people, we monitor software and hardware for problems, but we often forget the wetware (people) that are at the root.

Fortunately, the majority of people stop coding for a living for more positive reasons, like finding something that suits them better! If code is at the center of your universe and this sounds impossible to you right now, consider why the people who don’t code call the shots and why do they pay you to write code? They must get more value not coding for a living than you get coding for a living.

Career paths beyond coding career#

Here, we will briefly discuss what a moderately informed friend (me!) might tell you about five common paths (without having actually lived through all of them) of good churn.

• Engineering Management
• Product Management
• Developer Relations
• Developer Education
• Entrepreneurship

We will not discuss freelancing or consulting because these are similar to coding jobs with some solo business management tacked on top. You can also check out Nader Dabit’s The Prosperous Software Consultant, Gerald Weinberg’s Secrets of Consulting, and Harry Roberts’ Questions for Consultants if you are keen to try that.

Disclaimer#

Our discussions will try to inform you about the bad along with the good, which is to say it’s not 100% good. But nothing is. Don’t mistake this as “shitting on these paths;” they are obviously great career tracks that many enjoy. The intent is to warn you about potential downsides, so you go in with your eyes wide open.

The goal, as in the rest of this course, is not to be 100% correct; it is just to open your eyes to considerations you may not have thought about before and point you the way to learn more or form your own opinions.

📝 Author’s note: This lengthy disclaimer is the only sane way to write a broad-reaching chapter like this! Brace for a shitstorm of complaints…